1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods for managing device licenses, and in particular to a system and method for managing licenses of device groups.
2. Description of the Related Art
Feature licensing has been increasingly used to control the internal functions of electronic devices after they are purchased by customers. Feature licensing allows flexibility for customers to acquire devices with less upfront cost and pay later for additional functions and capacity. A feature license for a specific device controls which internal functions of that device are enabled. When an internal function has a range of capacity, a feature license can also control the level of capacity at which the function should perform. For example, a video encoder may support high efficiency video coding (HEVC) and a maximum of 64 video streams. When the encoder has a feature license that does not enable HEVC and limits the number of video streams to 16, the encoder does not perform HEVC and can only encode up to 16 video streams. However, when the encoder has a different feature license that enables HEVC and limits the number of video streams to 48, the encoder will do HEVC encoding on up to 48 video streams. To make sure that a feature license can only be used by a specific device, the feature license is cryptographically bound to the unique identification of the device.
While feature licensing targeting individual devices is effective in controlling device functions and capacity post device purchase, it does not readily extend to a group of devices. In many application scenarios, multiple devices work together as a group to perform a common function or support capacity larger than a single device can provide. For example, in a cable television headend, different devices for video reception, processing and distribution may all handle high-definition (HD) video. Meanwhile, multiple video distribution devices work together to serve a community whose population exceeds the capacity of a single video distribution device. For such a group of devices, whether of the same kind or different kinds, function and capacity control must be at the group level, instead of at the device level.